This proposal is to renew an institutional National Research Award that provides short-term research training for medical students. The Vanderbilt Student Research Training Program (SRTP) in Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism provides an intensive, high-quality research experience to medical students early in their academic careers. By doing so, this program seeks to improve the medical student's understanding of the importance of research and to expose students to career opportunities in biomedical research. Since its inception in 1975, this program has provided research training for over 700 students from 65 medical schools. The thematic focus of the program is diabetes and endocrinology and takes advantage of the long- standing, broad-based excellence of basic and clinical research in this area at Vanderbilt. The faculty of the SRTP is carefully selected based on both their research interest and their desire to provide a research opportunity for medical students and is composed of 74 investigators from the departments of Biochemistry, Biological Sciences, Cell Biology, Medicine, Microbology and Immunology, Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, Nursing, Ophthalmology, Pathology, Pediatrics, Pharmacology, Preventive Medicine, Psychology, Radiation Oncology and Surgery. The research opportunities for the medical student are quite diverse and range from gene regulation to signal transduction to in vivo human studies to behavioral psychology. The program utilizes the traditional research preceptor/role model approach in which each student is matched with an established investigator with whom he/she designs and executes a research project. In addition, student participants are united on a regular basis for a lecture series on clinical diabetes and current challenges for diabetic research, to interact with senior scientists and for social events. At the conclusion of the summer research experience, each participant presents a summary of his/her research in a traditional scientific meeting format. As described in a manuscript published in this funding period, mechanisms to assess the impact of the program, student satisfaction, faculty satisfaction and career choices of the student participants are in place and indicate that the program is having a positive impact on student attitudes toward biomedical research, is providing a positive research experience for medical students and is encouraging students to choose careers involving biomedical research.